Sad point of the day: Seeing a bunch of interesting concept
papers (lilo's diary entries)
disappear off Advogato. I hope they come back. I'm not
sure I agree with everything that was in them, but they have
been tought-provoking and interesting. (Those that have
been flaming him away: Shame on you!)

Personally dangerous point of the day (or
rather,
last
night): Got partially hooked on Everything 2.
Starting to write up nodes there is a recursive loop - you
always find something you want to link to, and thus have to
create ever more nodes.

The Everything experience, combined with
previous
inspections of WikiWikiWeb, has led me to
conlude that Ted Nelson (the
original inventor of hypertext and initator the Xanadu project, started
1960) was
right: You do need some way of hooking together multiple
nodes of text (he calls them 'berts' or somesuch) to form a
coherent text stream, but still be able to connect different
sets of them for form different streams. Neither linear
text nor traditional node/page based hypertext is enough,
and thus all of the web, Everything, and WikiWikiWeb fail to
live up to the original promise of hypertext. Everything
and Wiki comes closer than the overall web, though.

[Updated with reasons why you most likely would want to use
the Compaq's data sets over Advogato's. This update came as
a result of pvg's diary entry
implying there was little reason to use Compaq's data sets.]

Ankh mentions using the
correlation between evaluation from various people to find
out what to present.

This is a field that has seen some study; it is known as
"Collaborative Filtering" (or just "Personalization" when
the marketeers have been there), have implementations
available
from Firefly (now
purchased by Microsoft, IIRC - their website is down, so I
can't check), Net
Perceptions (the commericalized aspect of Grouplens,
and probably a couple of other companies.

If you are going to experiment with this, picking up a
book
on multi-variate analysis is probably not a bad idea. You
can get free
datasets from Compaq for research use. These measure
how well a bunch of people have liked films (from EachMovie,
while that still ran). They are probably better to use than
the Master/Journeyer/Apprentice ratings from Advogato, as I
expect "How well did you like that film?" to be more likely
to evaluate the same criterion in each person than the
various Advogato ratings. Apart from that, I expect the
data sets to be much larger - EachMovie was mass-targeted
and seemed quite popular.

Not that this is terribly relevant as a form of diary
for
me, but given the restrictions of the communications
medium... *grin*

Just saw another smart person release something under the
GPL. I really, really need to get my act together and
write up a single, coherent paper on how this hurt free
software. I've started a couple of times (mostly in e-mail
discussions), but never completed it.

Overall conclusion: The GPL only makes sense if you hate
commerical software so much that you are willing to hurt
free software to hurt commercial software, if you love
gratifying your own ego more than you love free software, or
if the building blocks you are using force you to use the
GPL. There is a long buildup of economics to show this,
something I was surprised at when I first discovered it.

Word to the wise: Do not pick up "The Turing Option"
(Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky, 1992) intending to read
just the first 50 pages or so. I read the entire 500 pages
in a stretch, procastinating the things I'd planned to do
during those seven hours. That's almost a standard workday
(if any such thing exists.)

I've spent the day doing a bunch of 'environment
maintenance' (asking customers to stop having their system
automatically bug me when the customer doesn't handle their
own problems, fixing minor bugs, etc) and working on the
design of two new frameworks: One to do distributed
transaction & message handling, and one to do customizable
user interfaces (including ability to plug new functionality
into a user interface, and having multiple versions of a
user interface that still use the same backend.)

Adding deltas on branches in CVSFile
didn't work after all. I've fixed it, and added code to let
it
manipulate branches and symbols. This is
enough that it should be possible to start doing fun stuff
with it - I'm going to try to produce a merged
FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD CVS repository the next time I get
some time to hack.

Still no docs beyond the source code, though.

On a more personal level, a new piano miracolously showed up
here
without the need of going through the
go-out-and-blow-a-lot-of-money routine I'd originally
expected to go through to get one (my grandmother suddenly
called and wanted to buy me one.)

This is cool, though the timing is lousy, as I'm moving in a
few days. Can't have it all, I guess.

Finally got around to fixing up my perl module to manipulate
RCS/CVS files enough that it might actually be useful for
manipulation.

It is now able to read and write RCS/CVS files, to retrieve
the text for any version in the file, and to add new
versions on an already existing branch. It is robust enough
on the read/write that I couldn't find any errors in a full
pass through the FreeBSD repository (reading in every single
file, writing it out, and looking through the diffs between
the original and the new copy.)

Forward steps:

Check that adding deltas on a branch work correctly

Extend the Invariant check to be closer to a complete
check of the invariants for the object